Zackjk

There’s a quote about love, that most mysterious of human emotions,
that I’ve come across that seems to be apt for how I’ve been
feeling recently.

It’s from a British author named Neil Gaiman, and it is as
follows:

"Have you ever been in love? Horrible isn't it? It makes you so
vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it
means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up
all these defenses, you build up a whole suit of armor, so that
nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any
other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life...You give them
a piece of you. They didn't ask for it. They did something dumb one
day, like smile at you, and then your life isn't your own anymore.
Lov…

Pope Benedict’s removal of limbo from the Catholic Church’s
doctrines raises an important and interesting point. It is
reasonably safe to assume that there exists a specific way that
reality actually is. There are different models that people
subscribe to that attempt to explain the way things are. The
current most popular scientific theory states that approximately
13,703,987,124 years, three months, and fifteen days ago, the
universe exploded into existence from an infinitely dense,
infinitely small singularity. The matter that we see all around us
condensed out of a soup of energy into quarks, leptons, protons,
neutrons, electrons, x-tons, and hundreds of other different
particles; ever since that world creating explosion the universe
h…

In Douglas Adams’ work of genius, The Hitchhiker’s
Guide to the Galaxy,
a trilogy in five parts, in one of the books, I think maybe it
could be The Restaurant at the End of the
Universe, I
do remember it was the one about Krikkit, a character, probably
Ford Prefect, makes a comment.

Referring to the killer white krikkiter robots, he says something
along the lines of they care, they care more, we don’t, not quite
as much, they win; apathy will always lose out against fanaticism,
there’s no reason to believe that that isn’t the case.

In the abortion debate there are pro-life/anti-choicers,
pro-choice/pro-death/anti-lifers, and those such as I who don’t
really give much of a fuck one way or the other.

Nothing
packs the same devastating wallop, a powerful blow to the gut, like
the realization of the inexorable march towards death. For as long
as I’ve been able to comprehend such things, I’ve known, in an
abstract way, about my mortality. However, knowing that, and being
able to say “yes, I know I’m going to die”, is much different from
comprehending the real implications of such a fact. Knowing that at
some point, exactly the same as right now, be it tomorrow or in
2073, there will be a moment when I draw my last breath, think my
last thought, see the last image that I ever will see. Nothing has
ever felt worse than thinking those thoughts, imagining how it
would be like, ever since I first fully realized that, when I
must’ve been eleven…

I am here, all of us are here, because of an incomprehensible chain
of a series of events, each of them as vital as any other, any of
which, if they had happened to happen differently, would’ve negated
our existence.

If anything, any part of it, no matter how seemingly small or
trivial, hadn’t happened, I would not be here right now.

Possibly, someone else would be here in my place, or no one would
be here at all.

If at the moment of conception, or to be a little more accurate,
and pedantic, slightly before it, your father had sneezed, which
caused him to shift his position ever so slightly, the lucky sperm
that won the race, and specifies half of your genes, would’ve been
a different one than the one that it was.